A New Venture

I’ve moved the art that used to be posted on this site to Zatista, a online gallery that offers my work for sale.  Please visit!

And see my posts on making and selling art on Signals to Attend, my current blog.

Moved, Subdivided, and Out in the Open

I’ve started new blogs:

Haiku Streak: I’ll post my daily haiku there (and store the haiku from this site when I delete it).

Signals to Attend: I’ll post essays there (and possibly reprise some of the essays included here).

I hope to add a poetry site shortly.

These sites will also use my real name (in case you’re curious).

Flame Out

Perhaps the end of this blog inspires me to speak, but I can’t resist a little political candor.

Up to now, I’ve avoided politics, and when I couldn’t resist weighing in, I’ve weighed both sides, criticized both sides, and generally remained what has become my favorite word, circumspect. I’ve tried to say something hopeful.  Today, however, I can’t resist giving in to my political despair.  Another election determined by imagery and performance?  Please, no.

McCain’s lead in the polls horrifies me.  I’m not sure I can survive one more triumph of style over substance.

I keep slipping into the thought that maybe we deserve him. Maybe a nation that can’t understand complex issues or ignores policy in favor of whims deserves the terrible leaders it gets.  Maybe a nation that prefers a clear narrative—any narrative—to deliberation and discernment gets its just reward.  Maybe we, and not our leaders, deserve credit for the latest failure of this great American experiment in democracy.  What would our founders think?  Thomas Jefferson could not have expected such sheep.

In its appraisal of Sarah Palin talking to Charles Gibson, Slate wrote:

It was painfully obvious—from the rote nature of her responses, the repetition of hammered-home phrases, and the non sequiturs that leapt up when she found herself led around an unfamiliar bend—that there is not a millimeter of depth undergirding those recitations, that she had never given a moment’s thought to these matters before two weeks ago.

More favorable accounts of her performance make her out to be a high school student defending a master’s thesis.  We are supposed to like her for making the effort, for being vehement and well-briefed on what Gibson might ask and how to answer.  But should this pop star—I don’t know how else to describe her—get credit simply for  performing well? If one half-step off the path leads her into empty talking points, if her performance evidences flair but little or no understanding, is that a reason to praise her?

But that’s only what I ask.  Others see a straight-shooting tough cookie where I see someone stringing clichés like informercials.  Others praise McCain for his maverick choice, calling it political genius.  I suppose it might be.  Thus far, he certainly seems to found something for us to buzz over now that Batman and the audacity of hope is stale.  Never mind we’ve reached crises that require real genius, not pandering.

We’ve had our head turned.  Even worse, somehow we think that’s a good thing.

When John McCain condemns Obama for voting the same way he did in the senate, he relies on our ignorance.  When the oldest presidential nominee in history chooses a diversionary, patently unqualified running mate, he relies on our superficiality.  When Karl Rove uses the same attributes to slam others and praise Palin, he hopes for amnesia.

Are we really going to justify those hopes?

I keep hearing people say they have a good feeling about John McCain and Sarah Palin, that they seem people they’d like.  In person, maybe I’d like them too, but I have many close friends I like more who I’d never think of electing. I know better than to rely on feelings.

Okay, maybe Obama bears guilt for some image-mongering too, but he at least seems to have a higher opinion of us.  At least he acknowledges the complexity of the challenges we face and resists the appeal of a ready, drum-thumping answer.  He hangs onto the hope we can still use our brains and tell wax from flesh, flash from light.

If I Blog Again

…please stop me.

Joe Felso is actually my third incarnation as a blogger. The first time I wrote a haiku a day and an essay a month, book reviews every once in a while, and, if I couldn’t think on anything else, pasted in poems I’d written long before. That blog wasn’t successful in any sense. I posted so infrequently, the only audience that could enjoy following that blog would also enjoy an afternoon watching flowers turn to the sun. I didn’t write enough to make it worthwhile even for me.

The second blog was a scary birth, so flawed in conception and design that it lasted only long enough to gasp its last breath.

This time I’ve tried much harder. For months I posted everyday, and then cut back to three or four times a week, which is still a lot. Though no one would mistake me for a self-promotion machine, I sought readers and tried to join a blogging community. I did have visitors this time.

But now this blog is ending just as the others have. So I’m thinking about what I did wrong or what I’d do differently next time…if there is one…someday. What advice would this spent blogger offer a new one?

1. Pace Yourself. Even a true believer in the power of consistent and dedicated practice will reach a point when pleasure drains from the process and the highest aesthetic standard becomes completion. WordPress tells bloggers that consistent posting will cultivate an audience, and, as I learned with my first blog, that’s certainly so. However, it won’t do you much good to post frequent crap. Every writer strikes a compromise between quality and productivity, and it helps to know your limits and post only as often as you can post well. Or forgive yourself if you can’t post well and try again tomorrow—consistency is a mighty big picture.

2. Specialize. Several blogs representing your different spheres of creativity may be better than one blog full of everything. Joe Felso purports to be Joe Average, representative. But the circles of my Venn diagrams describe eccentric intersections. I wonder if readers prefer knowing what they will encounter on a site, whether—as impressive as it might seem to offer more, more, more—a niche is more appealing than a pile. It’s one thing to create a consistent and reliable voice and another to sound the same no matter what your subject.

3. Use your name. Contrary to what you may expect, another name might not vanquish your fear of honesty, make you bold, or protect you. The greatest courage is being yourself. It’s tough to express conviction behind a mask, and the time may come when you will hunger to be yourself, honestly and openly. You owe some protection to the people around you—keep them hidden—but be yourself.

4. Know why you’re blogging. It’s easy to get caught up in the statistics and find yourself either twisting to appeal to readers or judging your work by how many visitors arrive. It takes a strong person to watch the blogstat line and not be moved by it in some way. A stronger person could ignore the stats and focus on his or her own motives.

Perhaps after a few months or years of unfettered free time, I may blog again. But this experience still needs to come into focus. If I blog again, I want to get it right.

Closing Shop

Anyone visiting here recently might not be surprised to learn this blog is coming to an end.

This post is number 360, and, at present pace, I’ll soon post for the 365th time. That will be enough. Though Joe Felso will circle like a derelict satellite for a while—long enough for me to copy everything—I won’t be adding any new posts after September 15th.

In my head, I’ve composed this pre-mortem several times, looking for ways to explain my departure that won’t sound like (or feel like) failure. I won’t manage it, but I’ve done the hardest part—saying I’m bowing out.

My decision is no rejection of the blogosphere. I’m not turning my nose up at what happens here.

Quite the contrary, the strangest part of blogging— not knowing who’s out there—is also what’s best about it. Publishing may be the pinnacle of success in the real world, but, to a blogger, creating a book can seem akin to creating a statue—no one sees it until the artist has polished every part. When he or she wheels it out of the workshop, it appears to have always existed, as if it’d been found rather than made. Books have instant esteem because they’re already wanted—by publishers at least—and anticipated.

In contrast, blogging has a more intimate charm. It can be like small town radio—you, sitting in a tiny room, talking into a microphone that may or may not work, sending your voice over cornfields, a kind of constant casting out into seas without fish. The idea, it seems, is to speak just to find out what you’ll say. When people listen, it means something.

Most people who don’t blog don’t take blogs very seriously. Friends sometimes seem embarrassed when you say you have a blog, and some real—meaning published—writers can be particularly disdainful, regarding blogs as an affront to editing and artfulness and decorous self-restraint.

That perspective couldn’t be more mistaken. You don’t have to read very long in WordPress or elsewhere to discover articulate, thoughtful, and skilled writers. Maybe more ambitious writers think giving prose or poetry away for free diminishes its quality—and some of the work online IS naïve—but hoping to earn an audience also makes the writing more sincere…and often more compelling.

So, why would I leave? The pace has broken me. The other side of blogging’s intimate charm is its intimate demands, the entreaties of an endlessly needy lover. When the only pay you receive for your writing is attention, you’re challenged with soliciting that attention over and over. I know I could decide not to care, say this blog is all for me, and claim having readers doesn’t matter. That would be a lie, however. I write for readers. I’m grateful for the people who’ve supported me, and, if I’m being honest, I have to say they’ve sustained me, kept me thinking I might have something worthwhile to say when I wasn’t as sure.

Quite rightly, having readers arises partly from being a reader. It’s reciprocal. You are supposed to visit blogs as an invitation to your own. Yet, having spent so much energy creating new product and responding to comments, I’m exhausted. I can’t find the energy to visit elsewhere, only the energy to regret it. Most of my visitors now are image seekers. Most of the reading bloggers are elsewhere, and I don’t blame them.

As little as I visit, I can see how crowded the market is. The proliferation of writing online is daunting. Blogging challenges you to win readers, yes, but it also tries your confidence. You must convince yourself that, of all these writers, you have something important to add. For me, that’s analogous to finding the comment I’d make already affixed to a post. I could just make the comment again and regard it as valuable… because this time I said it. The blogosphere allows me to believe that, to believe self-expression trumps everything else. Maybe some bloggers see venting frustration as their only aim. I’m not judging them—perhaps I shouldn’t hope for more—but I’m tired of wringing my hands.

I’m proud of the volume of work here, and soon seems a good time to stop.

Not So Nifty Fifty

I’ll be fifty in October.

Lately I’ve been saying that a lot, adding it onto statements as explanation, emphasis, authority, or excuse.  “I’ll be fifty in October,” I say, “and just can’t scale climbing walls anymore.”  Or I say, “This is the strangest running mate choice I’ve ever seen, and I’m turning fifty in October.”

The other day I heard myself say, “My fiftieth birthday is in October, and I still don’t know what I want to be.”

I know fifty is just another year—in base eight I’m remarkably well-preserved, and in base sixteen, I just became legal. But at my base ten age I expect to have more comportment, more calm, more gravitas.  I’ve always thought getting older meant striving less and looking back at successes more.

Of course, at fifty, there’s still plenty of time left to publish a book or become a respected artist, but hope doesn’t come as naturally as it does to younger folks. Besides having the world ahead of them, they have a crew of cheerleaders reminding them of their opportunities, their gifts, and their promise. They also have the anxiety of choosing among many doors—no thank you to that part—but their family and peers are, for the most part, hoping for the best and dreaming of a successful future.

In contrast, I have General Douglas MacArthur whispering  Corinthians in my ear, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

Fifty feels like the start of my putting away period.  Maybe it’s time to put away that fantasy of talking to Terry Gross about my new book to on Fresh Air.  Maybe it’s time to stop comparing my own, way-back-then mile times to those of the athletes I coach.  Maybe it’s time to give it a rest and accept that, though I’m not famous or successful on a grand, universal scale, I’ve found a comfortable and mostly satisfying life. Perhaps that’s plenty. Maybe I’ve had success enough.  Maybe I need to stop wanting more.

Success is, after all, more a matter of definition than attainment—your own sense of attainment versus society’s quite possibly flawed vision of success.  Wouldn’t it be nice if fifty brought me tranquility, appreciation, contentment?

I am tired, but, at nearly fifty, I’m clearly not tired enough.  No one should be ready to put me in the retirement home, and I’m not ready either.  Yet I wouldn’t mind slowing down, wouldn’t mind a little less fire in my belly…which, now, I have trouble distinguishing from reflux.

Thankfully, I’m healthy and relatively free of the indignities of aging I’ll suffer later.  People tell me I don’t look fifty.  That’s nice but also sad.  Inside, 1980 doesn’t seem that long ago either, and I carry many of the same unfulfilled ambitions of that year.  Maybe if I looked older, I might be forgiven for resting.  I might forgive myself. Sometimes I think that’s all I desire, all I ought to desire, all I have a right to desire.

As a child, I knew exactly how old I’d be when the century turned, and I was aiming for that moment, sure of where it would find me.  Now turning 50 feels like half way.  As I venture into more unimagined territory, I’m carrying all the same luggage.  I wish I had a better sense of where I’m going.

I might satisfy for knowing where I’ve been.

Circling

A looped rope
lies on deck,
and the last
touches the first.
The middle
commingles.
Who’s to say
what repetition
means when we
can’t know echoes,
can’t know the ghostly
strands woven
of chance and fate?

A coil springs
from memory,
and the impulse
falls on itself.
The middle co-
mingles. What means
make ends when
ends are never last,
never climax
of chance and fate,
and never never?

The middle commingles.
A looped bit of music
insists on perpetuity
in memory.  Echoes?
The ghostly black
strands of branches
in moonlight.  The light
falls on itself, layers
of illumination we can’t
separate, can’t know
apart from one
another.

A looped rope
about the mast, and more
neat than it would be
without us.  The middle:
it knows itself
without precedent,
consequence.  Who’s
to say echoes
die? The days
tread like ghosts, us
among them, amid
them, inside
them, middle
commingling.

Ambition vs. Desire

What do they say about wishes and horses?

Most people have plenty of wishes—they want to be rich executives, or famous performers, or skilled artists, or successful something elses, but fulfilling ambitions doesn’t rely on desire.  Success comes from action, and more than simply practicing or working hard.  While an author or actor or athlete might still occasionally be “discovered,” some element of self-promotion seems necessary.  “You have to put yourself out there,” people say, or “If you don’t believe in you, who else will?”

I have these thoughts when I try to account for my status as another unpublished writer in America—or think about my more dubious identity as a blogger. Though I “practice my craft” relentlessly, I can’t be taken seriously until someone else agrees to the quality of my work and says he or she will pay for it.  Until then, I fall back on self-definition, trying to convince myself that I have enough skill and experience as a writer to say I am one.

And though a person in my position would love to say he or she doesn’t care about publication, admiration, or remuneration—while he or she may say the writing itself is its own reward—no one can entirely believe that.  They might ask who would write—or paint, or make music, or do anything directed out into the world—without wanting to be seen and heard.  They might say only those who haven’t tasted success say it’s unimportant.

If my wishes were horses, I’d have ridden ten thousand miles by now.  Truth is I’d like to be published, but the moment arrives when I have to send my work away, and that moment passes. I’m missing the active part of ambition, the will to seek ratification or affirmation. And self-promotion—telling the world how worthy my work is—just makes me sick. Let’s face it—it either is or isn’t, and my saying which makes very little difference. Millions of people are like me, and it’s hard to believe I’m special.

You can attribute my hang ups to fear of rejection or to fear of success—or to my mother—but any hypothesis is academic.  Who is going to dig that far?

Yoda said, “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try,” and I do not.

Gentrification

Down the shadowed end of my street, among
the false roof lines of new-built condos and
the fenced patches of pachysandra and boxwood
forbidden to dogs and people,

some of the older homes survive. Their shingles
sag, and the grass that grows claws its way into dirt
looking for water.  Those houses seem guests now—
shunned by politeness, supplicant somehow

to the stiff smiles around them.  No one can
will them gone—no one would—but their
resistance awaits opportunity, any excuse
to see them fall.  When I walk by, I stop

to re-imagine them new, how they were once
hope, their twisted trees once wired to stand
straight and their windows bright, uncurtained,
unclouded. I wonder if anyone inside remembers

bricks as scrubbed as the homes around them,
if inside someone is thinking about promises
and how every assurance dies too soon,
each empty lot the next front for amnesia.

A Healthier Rat

On Olympic coverage the other day I heard the American marathoner Deena Kastor say that she doesn’t like the word “sacrifice” applied to all she must forgo or avoid. She prefers the word “choices.”  As an athlete, she understands what’s required to fulfill her ambitions and accepts the cost.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been counting calories.  Some people say “counting calories” to mean “dieting” or  “watching what you eat,” but I mean that I’ve been recording the calories of everything I eat in an online food journal—and not just calories, but whether the calories come from carbohydrates, fat, or protein and how much sugar and sodium I consume each day.

I feel like a lab rat, but I’m a healthier rat.

Research indicates people who keep food diaries lose more weight than other dieters, and I see why.  The unconscious becomes conscious.  Every bite is somehow new, and you begin imagining ingredients split on the table before you.

For some people that state of mind must sound like a nightmare. George D. Prentice, a Louisville newspaper editor, once said, “What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.”

Self-consciousness isn’t a comfortable or pleasant condition.  Most people prefer to eat whatever looks good—eating is a pleasure after all.  And aren’t the rest of our lives hard enough without having to monitor what we consume?  Does everything have to be a chore?

Truthfully, I like to live in the moment and would rather not think about eating too.  I rail against the indignity of aging as much as the next fogey—complaining about what I love and can’t have.  That point of view just hasn’t been working lately.  The choice seems simple: I can have unconsciousness as long as I don’t mind my creeping weight gain and attendant self-recrimination (it’s own unpleasant form of self-consciousness).  Or I can be a little more healthy by accepting some measure of self-awareness and denial.

People make similar negotiations between self-restraint vs. liberty in every aspect of their lives, and I’m just trying to make my own choice.  I don’t want to become a sanctimonious dieter preaching conversion. I’ve felt inadequate in the presence of those people myself, and now, frankly, it’s embarrassing to measure and record, to turn down what’s offered me, to explain why I’m eating what I am.  Some people will always regard self-restraint as an affront. Some see any attempt to regulate your diet as futile, naïve, unrealistic, or delusional.

Maybe.  I can’t see counting calories all the time or counting them for the rest of my life, but, at this early stage, I’m just hoping for a little re-education and more positive habits.  So far I’ve gained as much awareness as I’ve lost pounds—I’m discovering new foods and think I better understand  what satisfies me.

And, oddly, I’m enjoying the science.  I’ve always had an addictive personality, and the data collection, the day-to-day comparisons, the statistical patterns, and the hypothesizing about future choices appeals to me.

I don’t know how long this diet can last—I’ll take it day by day—but, for now at least, I’m a happier rat.